Building data-driven applications on Cloud Foundry with Spring

Cloud-native applications and platforms are part of a much bigger transformation happening in the software industry. At the center of that transformation is DevOps, which is changing the way we build and operate software.

Fred Melo and Casey West explore DevOps, continuous delivery, and microservices for data-driven applications. Fred and Casey cover the basics of continuous delivery for microservices using Spring Boot and leveraging the built-in capabilities of the open source Cloud Foundry platform. Fred and Casey explain in detail the capabilities in an operationally mature production environment, including infrastructure and application lifecycle management, deployment, auto-provisioning backing services, and failure recovery, offering a rubric for anyone building their own production platform composed of unstructured components or choosing an integrated, structured platform from the many options available.

It’s not enough to automate the production environment your applications live in. It’s critically important to automate the delivery pipeline as well through continuous delivery. Fred and Casey demonstrate continuous delivery using automated build and deployment techniques, including a detailed explanation of how to accomplish blue-green deployments for zero-down-time, low-risk releases. Fred and Casey also introduce the concept of data microservices with Spring Cloud Stream and explain how to build composable data streaming pipelines by orchestrating those primitives using Spring Cloud Data Flow before building a simple recommendation engine that uses these open source components and leverages Spark’s machine-learning library, Spark MLlib.

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have a clear understanding of how to leverage Cloud Foundry, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud Stream, and Spring Cloud Data Flow to build powerful and reliable data-driven applications.

This tutorial is sponsored by Pivotal.

Fred Melo

Pivotal

Fred Melo has been working with Cloud Foundry since its origins and writing software for longer than he’d like to admit. Fred currently works as a technical director at Pivotal. He is especially passionate about scalable and resilient software architectures and spends his time speaking to communities and helping customers on their journeys to transform through software.

Casey West

Pivotal

Working in Internet infrastructure, web app security, and design taught Casey West to be a paranoid, UX-oriented, problem-solving Internet plumber. His earliest contributions to Perl live on to this day on your Mac. Casey’s speaking and writing topics range from open source communities and culture to technical architecture and automation tips and tricks. Casey wears the mantle of principal technologist focused on Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry platform and lives in Pittsburgh, where he’s raising three sarcastic children.